Friendly Fire (54 page)

Although the straight line map distance from their LZ to the top of their initial objective, the hill, was less than 500 meters, Charlie Company took almost six hours reaching the crest. The moment the lead elements crossed the creek bed they entered jungle, and the hill, which had not looked so steep on the 1:50,000 scale Army map, seemingly shot straight up. The ground was muddy, slick. The men climbed single file, chopping their way through the dense growth. It was not the sort of jungle that war movies had prepared them for—the usual Hollywood broadleaf plants. It wasn't woods either. There was heavy foliage, an undergrowth and overgrowth. Hanging vines snagged packs and equipment. Brush gave way to trees; trees gave way to brush. The triple canopy jungle made it impossible for the ground to dry. As each man followed the man in front, the trail became muddier, more slippery, steeper. Over and over again a man would lose his balance, slide backward, claw at the vines to catch himself and fall. Repeatedly the column had to stop.

Polk welcomed every opportunity to rest. He had sweated his fatigues wet. The thick mud clung to his boots. Again and again he would slip, the heavy pack would pull him backward, and he would start to flail. Mullen would catch him from behind.

“Mulligan,” Polk said. “I'm whipped.”

“We all are,” Michael said. “Don't think we're not.”

Ahead in the column, Culpepper could hear the men talking in low, excited voices and pushed forward to hear.

“Look,” Razzle-Dazzle said, pointing at tracks on the ground.

“Jesus!” Culpepper said. “A tiger! It must weigh three, four hundred pounds!”

The tracks, at least eight inches across, were clearly defined in the soft mud. More than anything in his life Culpepper wanted to see that tiger. He had always wanted a tiger skin. Now, seeing that the tracks were fresh and wet and huge, he began to hope for a chance to shoot one. But farther on, when Charlie Company continued up the hill, the tracks veered off, and Culpepper saw no trace of the tiger again.

Whenever the men stopped, the silence closed in about them. That silence was what had always struck Abe Aikins as so strange. There were no sounds in the jungle at all—except, of course, for the heavy breathing of the men. There were no birds. In the lowlands one might hear a frog. Higher up an occasional cricket. Nevertheless, to Aikins, the eerie thing about the jungles of Vietnam was that quiet. He attributed it to the bombing.

The entire time Aikins was in Vietnam he saw only one bird. It had been huge. Bigger than an eagle. Yellow with a black head. He had no idea what it was, but he had seen that same bird twice. The first time he had been in a night logger position when the bird flew overhead, making a sound like an incoming rocket, and Aikins dived for cover. The next morning the bird returned and, to Aikins' astonishment, flew smack into the brush. There was a tremendous crash, and Aikins had lain there, thinking, “Oh, my God, what if the bird decides to attack me?” The column began to move forward up the hill again.

Abe Aikins was six feet four inches. He had been a basketball player at Hofstra College and later at Fort Dix. His height had always been an advantage until now. The point man never chopped a hole large enough through the cover. Aikins would continually become tangled in the dense growth and would have to crouch and duckwalk. With forty-five pounds on his back, he found that duckwalking took little time to get to his legs.

“This fuckin' hill is too fuckin' much!” a rifleman behind Aikins swore.

“Save your breath,” Aikins told him.

“Haven't fuckin' got any.”

The lead elements of Charlie Company discovered an old path and started following it. Captain Cameron, fearful of booby traps, ordered them off the trail. “Stay to the left where you belong!”

“That's easy for you to say,” a rifleman called back. “You ain't up here chopping!”

By now Delta Company had been combat-assaulted into its LZ and the four 105mm howitzers from Fat City had been airlifted to the top of Hill 410. A portion of Alpha Company had been placed on Hill 410, too, to provide security for the guns. Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf, whose CP had been set up to one side, was in radio contact with his company commanders and knew the progress each had made. He was not worried about Charlie Company's slowness in reaching its objective. But he, too, was surprised their hill was so steep.

If one were to clear off the brush and trees and look at Charlie Company's objective from above, the hill looked somewhat like one of those old profile drawings of Mickey Mouse. Mickey's dinner-plate ears were fully exposed, his nose was pointing north. It was as though Mickey were resting his head on the ground. His near ear, the “left” ear, had a higher elevation than his “right” ear. A little after three o'clock Echo's recon platoon reached the top of this near end and, as planned, separated from Charlie Company to take up its selected position along the forward edge of Mickey's “right” ear. Charlie Company continued west at this junction and moved single file across the narrow ridge toward Mickey's “head.” When they reached the other side, Cameron discovered that the north face of the hilltop was a cliff that dropped nearly eighty feet straight down.

“Captain? Captain Cameron?” someone called. “You'd better come up here and take a look at what we've found.”

The men were gathered around an abandoned defensive position containing foxholes, a machine-gun pit and wooden structures to dry clothes and fish. At first the men thought it might be a Vietcong rest camp. Cameron called for the Vietnamese scout and asked what he thought it was. The scout, too, thought it VC, but something wasn't right. The foxholes were too shallow, the machine-gun emplacement too sloppily dug. Cameron radioed Lieutenant Colonel Schwarzkopf and reported what he had found. He told his battalion commander that the structures did not appear to have been occupied in recent years. The drying racks had collapsed; the foxholes were overgrown. Still, as Cameron told Schwarzkopf, Charlie Company would need to check it out.

Cameron sent a patrol back down the narrow finger to ensure that Charlie Company had not been trailed. He next sent patrols off both sides and forward to the clearing to make certain no one was waiting for them to bed down for the night.

Abe Aikins was looking at the abandoned machine-gun position. Sergeant MacPhearson of the 2nd Platoon pointed out that it directly overlooked the valley in which Charlie Company's lift ships had landed. “I'll tell you one thing,” MacPhearson said. “If they'd been up here with any sort of fire power at all, they could have wiped us out on our LZ.”

“MacPhearson!”
Lieutenant Miller yelled. David Miller was MacPhearson's platoon leader.

“Coming, sir,” MacPhearson said.

Lieutenant Miller wanted MacPhearson with him when Captain Cameron assigned the platoons their defensive perimeter positions for the night.

Cameron initially assigned the 3rd Platoon the south slope of the hilltop with the 1st Platoon at the north slope overlooking the cliff, but before the men dug in, he switched the platoons around. The right flank of the 3rd Platoon and the left flank of the 1st Platoon were tucked together. The 2nd Platoon was assigned the approach from the west. All three platoons were pulled in tight to form a close perimeter. Within that perimeter were Cameron's command post, Lieutenant Rocamora's artillery forward observer post and the mortar platoon.

The most vulnerable position was the 2nd Platoon's. There the men would be facing a clearing, the only open space around with the exception of a small hole in the trees above the mortar platoon. That break in the jungle canopy provided the mortars overhead clearance to fire.

The 3rd Platoon dug in at the edge of the cliff. Although visibility was limited because of the heavy foliage, Cameron thought it unlikely that an attacking force would attempt to scale the cliff.

On the south side of the hill, where the 1st Platoon had been placed, the land was heavy virgin jungle. Some of the trees whose trunks were two feet thick rose fifty feet in the air. The jungle was so thick and the hillside dropped off so sharply that the men of the 1st Platoon could see only twenty yards or so ahead of them. Nevertheless, the Vietcong or North Vietnamese would have as difficult a time scaling that slick, steep hill as had Charlie Company. And in spite of Cameron's respect for the Vietcong's ability to sneak around, he doubted they could climb the hill without making some sound.

From its position on the south side, the 1st Platoon would be able to provide security for the rears of the 2nd and 3rd platoons and the CP. The only alternative would have been to place them farther down the slope. Had they dug in there, however, they would have been out of sight over the brow of the hilltop with little security for their flanks. Additionally, such a position would have exposed the 2nd and 3rd platoon rears.

Captain Cameron discussed the placement of the mortar platoon with Lieutenant Roderick Bayliss, its black platoon leader. Bayliss and Cameron were both satisfied with its position behind the 3rd Platoon. From there it could fire support missions not only for Charlie Company but for the Echo rconnaissance platoon as well. Cameron made one last tour of his company's defensive perimeter with his platoon leaders. He was confident he had placed his men properly and that they were digging in well.

The men dug foxholes and sleeping positions. Each man carried in his pack twelve olive-drab plastic bags which, as he dug his foxhole, he would fill with dirt for sandbags. The fox holes were large enough to provide a fighting position for from three to four men. Behind the foxhole would be the men's sleeping position. These were dug just below ground level so that anyone shooting low could not strike the men within them. The olive-drab plastic sandbags would be placed around the fox hole and sleeping position on all four sides. The men would then camouflage the sandbags so that the positions would blend with the ground.

While his men were digging in, Captain Cameron selected and positioned three listening posts along the most likely routes of attack. He placed the first LP on the narrow finger the company had had to cross single file approximately fifty meters east of the linked flanks of the 1st and 3rd Platoons. The second LP was fifty meters west of the 2nd platoon's front at the edge of that clearing. Cameron situated his third LP over the lip of the hill in front of the 3rd Platoon, where the jungle was so thick the men did not have an adequate field of fire. Each listening post was occupied by three men equipped with a radio. Once the LPs were set, Cameron met with his forward observer, First Lieutenant Albert S. Rocamora, to select the defensive targets (DTs).

Lieutenant Rocamora was small and thin, like a racetrack exercise boy. Although he had been born in the Phillipines, he had been reared and attended schools in California. He and Cameron were very close, and it was understood that if Cameron became a casualty and someone was needed to immediately take command, that commander would be Lieutenant Rocamora.

Rocamora had attended Officers Candidate School and, upon receiving his commission as a second Lieutenant, was ordered to the artillery school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He was immediately sent to Vietnam. (After Cameron's tour in Vietnam was completed, Rocamora was due for a job at the rear. He instead volunteered to remain in the field to help break in Charlie Company's new company commander. He then volunteered to stay an additional month in the field to alleviate the shortage of qualified forward observers.) As soon as Rocamora saw that Cameron had his platoons in position, he approached with his maps.

Cameron and Rocamora used to compete with each other to see who could come closest to locating their exact position on the map. The maps in Vietnam were often erratic, and an infantry company, deep within a jungle hilltop, was rarely able to see far enough to locate cross-references to pinpoint its position. Both Rocamora and Cameron, however, agreed on their exact position that night.

“Okay,” Cameron said, “I think their most likely approach will be through that clearing toward the Second Platoon. It's relatively flat in relation to everything else around us. It's a natural attack and escape route.”